Euphemisms and Ethics: A Language-Centered Analysis of Penn State’s Sexual Abuse Scandal

For 15 years, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky used his Penn State University perquisites to lure young and fatherless boys by offering them special access to one of the most revered football programs in the country. He repeatedly used the football locker room as a space to groom, molest, and rape his victims. In February 2001, an eye-witness alerted Penn State\u27s top leaders that Sandusky was caught sexually assaulting a young boy in the showers. Instead of taking swift action against Sandusky, leaders began a cover-up that is considered one of the worst scandals in sports history. While public outcry has focused on the leaders\u27 silence, we focus on the talk that occurred within the organization by key personnel. Drawing from court documents and internal investigative reports, we examine two euphemism clusters that unfolded in the scandal. The first cluster comprises reporting euphemisms, in which personnel used coded language to report the assault up the chain of command. The second cluster comprises responding euphemisms, in which Penn State\u27s top leaders relied on an innocuous, but patently false, interpretation of earlier euphemisms as a decision-making framework to chart their course of (in)action. We use this case to demonstrate how euphemistic language impairs ethical decision-making, particularly by framing meaning and visibility of acts, encouraging mindless processing of moral considerations, and providing a shield against psychological and material consequences. Further, we argue that euphemism may serve as a disguised retort to critical upward communication in organizations

Communicating Resilience: A Discursive Leadership Perspective

In this essay we challenge whether current conceptions of optimism, hope, and resilience are complete enough to account for the complexity and nuance of developing and maintaining these in practice. For example, a quick perusal of popular outlets (e.g., Forbes, Harvard Business Review) reveals advice to managers urging them to “be optimistic,” or “be happy” so that these types of emotions or feelings can spread to the workplace. One even finds simple advice and steps to follow on how to foster these types of things in the workplace (McKee; Tjan). We argue that this common perspective focuses narrowly on individuals and does not account for the complexity of resilience. Consequently, it denies the role of context, culture, and interactions as ways people develop shared meaning and reality. To fill this gap in our understanding, we take a social constructionist perspective to understand resilience. In other words, we foreground communication as the primary building block to sharing meaning and creating our worlds. In so doing, we veer away from the traditional focus on the individual and instead emphasise the social and cultural elements that shape how meaning is shared by peoples in various contexts (Fairhurst, Considering Context). Drawing on a communication, discourse-centered perspective we explore hope and optimism as concepts commonly associated with resilience in a work context. At work, leaders play a vital role in communicating ways that foster resilience in the face of organisational issues and events (e.g., environmental crises, downsizing). Following this lead, discursive leadership offers a framework that positions leadership as co-created and as the management of meaning through framing (Fairhurst, Power of Framing). Thus, we propose that a discursive leadership orientation can contribute to the communicative construction of resilience that moves away from individual perspectives to an emphasis on the social. From a discursive perspective, leadership is defined as a process of meaning management; attribution given by followers or observers; process-focused rather than leader-focused; and as shifting and distributed among several organizational members (Fairhurst Power of Framing). By switching from the individual focus and concentrating on social and cultural systems, discursive leadership is able to study concepts related to subjectivity, cultures, and identities as it relates to meaning. Our aim is to offer leaders an alternative perspective on resilience at the individual and group level by explaining how a discursive orientation to leadership can contribute to the communicative construction of resilience. We argue that a social constructionist approach provides a perspective that can unravel the multiple layers that make up hope, optimism, and resilience. We begin with a peek into the social scientific perspective that is so commonplace in media and popular portrayals of these constructs. Then, we explain the social constructionist perspective that grounds our framework, drawing on discursive leadership. Next, we present an alternative model of resilience, one that takes resilience as communicatively constructed and socially created. We believe this more robust perspective can help individuals, groups, and cultures be more resilient in the face of challenges

Publications Received

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98319/1/0023-8333.00027.pd

Exploring Organizational Communication (Micro) History Through Network Connections

In light of the 100th anniversary of the National Communication Association, the following essay offers an initial look at the communication subdiscipline of organizational communication and its development over the past seven-plus decades. As part of this review, we advocate the use of network methods as a microhistory analytic tool to explore the vast number of connections, both between people and research interests, generated as the discipline developed from its humble beginnings. This work represents a small sample of the greater Organizational Communication Genealogy Project. This larger effort seeks to create a detailed review of the discipline as it explores the relationships between advisors and advisees, the development of dissertation and current research topics, the collaborative network of coauthorship, and the contributions of individual scholars through the analysis of interview data, narratives, and historical documents

“I was pretty appalled by this.”: Teaching Students About the Exclusive and Exclusionary Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem

This conference session is about the design and reception of a research lesson focusing on the importance of understanding biases that are inherent in the research and scholarly publication processes, and how students and faculty can be more intentional in their research process through inclusive language, asking questions about information, and thinking critically about research. The lesson provides foundational information about how the scholarly publishing ecosystem works and how it can (and does) exclude more diverse voices, encourages students to think more deeply about their own identities and how those identities can affect the research they do, and concludes with a discussion about citation justice and the importance of citing not just to avoid plagiarism but to give minoritized scholars credit for their work. It also provides students and their accompanying faculty with tools to help ensure that their research represents a more diverse field. By providing transparent information about how scholarly publishing works and how much and why the library pays for the information they are expected to use in their projects, students are trusted to understand how information has value and the world excludes those who cannot afford to engage. It also challenges them to consider their own identities and how they may have assumptions or biases that could affect the results they achieve when doing research. While more theoretical than most one-shot library instruction, this lesson (re)engaged both students and the librarians teaching it, and has been gaining popularity since its creation. The conference session will also discuss how the lesson was received by students, how it can be modified to work with any discipline, and how it will be utilized in the future. There will also be recommendations on how to do similar work with your own students

The eyes have it: Using eye-tracking to evaluate a library website

When Western New England University announced its intentions to switch over its entire website from a legacy homegrown system to a brand new CMS, we were faced with moving all content on the library’s website from one platform to another over the course of a summer. We needed to make our content fit into a strict new design scheme, but also wanted to take full advantage of the switch and use it as an opportunity to make our content work even better for our students. To determine how successfully students were able to navigate the new library website, we partnered with our engineering department to conduct a usability study using eyetracking software. In addition to useful information about how students use the website, we also learned a great deal about conducting research and working with outside partners. Through sharing our experience, we hope that anyone interested in conducting their own usability study will come away with tips, ideas, and pitfalls to avoid